* Fire kept burning through the longest night of the year, wiki
Let's Get Back In Rhythm With Nature, This Solstice
After coming to this planet and living here for so many years now, I can still not get over the wonder and awe at the care that has gone into making my stay comfortable. The arrangements are nothing short of heavenly! Just visualize the blue marble spinning on its axis at a speed of about 465 meters per second. Four hundred sixty five meters per second - that's a lot of vertigo! And this marble hurtles around a huge ball of fire at a speed of about 30 kilometers per second. Thirty kilometers in one second - that's a lot of speed! And yet, despite the heady cocktail of dizziness and hurtle, I am feeling oh so comfortable as I am typing this; just the same comfort that I felt when I slid out of the womb into the open air. And, going by the experiences shared by others who have passed by this property before me, this degree of comfort is undisturbed by and large, barring a tsunami here or a hurricane there or an earthquake here-and-there, which I put down to system maintenance. Such an elaborate arrangement of such universal scale needs some downtime sometimes, is it not?
And to dot the revolution around the huge ball of fire are two occasions that happen so consistently year after year. Sometime between June 20 & 23, and then again between December 20 & 23, the earth tilts one of its polar caps towards the Sun. "And while we were busy getting on with our life, while life continued to happen to us, the earth and the sun performed this very exquisite change of rhythm in their cosmic dance on the Solstice Day" -- was how I wrote about the June Solstice of 2008 in my Quest for Nirvana blog. A yin-and-yang dance between the earth and the sun, "...a divine love affair that has been going on since eternity - but only from a distance - acknowledgment of this love taking place only in this gesture of the imperceptible bow". You really must read this piece if you haven't already - here is the post.
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* Diagram of the Earth's seasons as seen from the north. Far right: December solstice.
Somehow, in our quest for living in these modern times, we have tended to move away from this subtle cosmic event. Standing on the toes, peering into the distance to catch a glimpse of the approaching bus or train or car or whatever that will take us to wherever, we have tended to lose sight of the "standing still" of the Sun taking place in the sky. Glued to the couch before the TV, getting our regular dose of the favorite soap or getting amused at the politicians tying themselves in knots over resolving this or that crisis, we overlook the slight tilt that the ground beneath the feet is undergoing. Working on the next move that will help score brownie points over that rival, or deciding on how to manage that intimate relationship that seems to be derailing, we dismiss the significance of the rhythm of the event that really doesn't have any direct impact on our material life.
Which is sad. Because, if we look back, we find our forefathers used to attach a lot of importance to the symbolism that the solstices represent. Perhaps that is because they were more in tune with Nature than we are. Given the hardships and the problems that we are facing, isn't it time we began getting back in tune with Nature? And regain our sense of balance and re-capture the sense of comfort of getting up in the morning everyday and see the Sun right where it is supposed to be, the earth right where it has been set to be?
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* Potbellie in Monte Alto, Escuintla, Guatemala. Somebody in 1800 BCE sculpted this altar as part of an elaborate ritual in an astronomically aligned Monte Alto complex in Guatemala. That somebody was part of a culture and society that was in tune with Mother Nature.
Today, 21 December, is the Winter Solstice. Chances are, this momentous event will be overlooked and ignored by the world. And to think that we spend time and money in celebrating events such as the New Year of January the First, which is practically of no significance - somebody in the Medieval Ages randomly thought of creating a calendar which randomly begins with this particular date. And mechanically, like a robot, we have been following that somebody's dictum down the ages. If we build some personal ritual around this day to mark this event, then soon, the business houses will take the cue and create beautiful cards to sell to us and public functions for us to buy in and participate and have fun, so that they can earn money on the Solstice days. And there are two such days every year - year after year! So twice the opportunity to do business, such incentive! For us, us ordinary human beings who simply want peace and solace and food and shelter and money-in-the-bank and good friends and intimate relationships and some happiness and not much else, we can begin appreciating as a mass, the nice and cozy arrangements that have been made to make our stay on the planet Earth so comfortable.
Animals Can Teach Us A Thing Or Two In Self-Development
Sometimes I wish we could communicate with the animals. Over the past millennia, a process of dis-connect with Nature has been going on hand-in-hand with our quest to become biped. In our enthusiasm to develop the ability to walk tall, we have actually moved away from Mother Earth. We have come to rely so much on logic and abstraction and analysis and theorizing, and so absorbed have we become in appreciating the prowess of our brain and muscle that we have ironically tended to overlook and undervalue anything that is not registered by our instruments. Not given to such self-absorption, animals on the other hand have remained blissfully tuned in with the elements of Nature. And had we had the ability to communicate with them, they would certainly be in a position to teach us a thing or two!
The recent news about an observation, carried out after scientific studies, that animals generally tend to align themselves with the north-south magnetic axis of the planet, needs to be appreciated from this perspective. But then they don't carry the magnetic compass with them, do they? Then how come? How is it that we, the most intelligent of all living species that has ever walked on Earth, do not possess this ability? Of being able to naturally detect the north-south magnetic direction, without any external aids, I mean?
It is called Magnetoreception, this ability to sense magnetic alignment. This ability comes easy to all types of cattle, several insect groups such as honeybees, termites, flies, etc. Fishes, birds, ...you name it, and they all have this sense. Except perhaps me and you.
In fact, we have known of the long distance migration of birds and aquatic creatures from one location to another, in tune with the change of seasons. They do their relocation unerringly, precisely, year after year, and without the aid of any technology. They all do it, all the time. Just about everybody possesses this magic, except perhaps me and you.
It has been discovered that somewhere deep inside, the magnetic axis does have an impact on us. But so subtle is this sensation, and so total is our preoccupation with the material world around us, that we have never taken cognizance of it. Take our own sleeping position for instance. When we sleep in the E-W direction, it takes us less time to slip into dreaming mode than when we sleep in the N-S direction. (The time taken to shift from sleep to dream-mode sleep is called REM Latency.) When we were less than a year old, our REM latency was very short: which means that as an infant we would begin dreaming no sooner we closed our eyes; irrespective of the direction the caregiver put us in. Now, very interestingly, schizophrenic patients too have been observed to have abnormally low REM latency. Adding two plus two, we could hypothesize that sleeping in the N-S direction is best for our physiology - never mind at what level it affects us. (And let's leave it to the researchers to reject the null hypothesis!)
When sitting for meditation, facing the north of the earth's magnetic pole anecdotally gives the best results, as my post here suggests. The brain's own electromagnetic field and the earth's magnetic field are in resonance with each other, just like that of the cattle grazing out in the fields!!!
Yes, I wish we possessed the ability to communicate with animals. We would re-learn from them so many things that we have de-learned in our race to become homo sapiens.
[*Full-Circle Color Panorama of Phoenix Landing Site on Northern Mars, Polar Projection - courtesy NASA. ]
Exciting Times Lie Ahead
That water is available on Mars is now old news. The buzz that has all space enthusiasts agog is the rumor that the team monitoring the wet-chemistry experiment - which the clumsy robots are working on out there on Mars - has stumbled upon some ground-breaking discovery related to the composition of Martian soil. And this time they have chosen to rush, not to the press, but to the White House to brief the folks about it. All news is - uncharacteristically - being kept under covers, apparently till further analyses corroborates whatever it is they have come across. While the rumor is being actively sought to be squashed, asneak peek is scheduled for today, August 5, 2008, 11 am PDT, at a teleconference organized by NASA for the media.
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[*Uni. Of Arizona Video footage on the Phoenix mission.]
Expect the reports coming through over the next few weeks to oscillate between "Yes, the planet is hospitable for human life" and "No; the planet is not hospitable for us yet to go there, settle down, fall in love, get married and then get divorced, raise children and die". I am skeptical about the latter. Skeptical not about the settling/loving/marrying/divorcing/dying part, oh we are past masters at all this, but about the 'no' part. Going by our record of the past couple of millennia, if the planet is not hospitable; well, we will make it hospitable. If the environment is harsh, we will modify it to suit our tastes and comfort and lifestyle. We will create the right ecosystem where we can subsist and then do all that we always do... you know - the settling down, the falling in love, etc, oh no, no need to worry about non-hospitability.
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[* NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander used the motorized rasp on the back of its robotic arm scoop during the mission's 60th Martian day, or sol, (July 26, 2008) to penetrate a hard layer at the bottom of a trench informally called "Snow White." This view, taken by the lander's Surface Stereo Imager and presented in approximately true color, shows the trench later the same sol. Image and text courtesy - NASA.]
Wonder how we would react if one of these missions were to discover some living being stalking the planet? Surely, we have evolved, no?, from the time when we had fled from our homes upon listening on the radio that the Martians had landed? When we rushed to the churches to pray to the almighty to save the world as we knew it from the aliens, never mind that the world has already gone to the dogs, and ask for forgiveness and absolutions of our sins, since "we are all going to die anyways"?
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[* Orson Welles at work, delivering a running commentary of the events of the "landing of Martians" in Van Nest Park, New Jersey, on October 30, 1938. The warring Martians moved swiftly within the span of the next few minutes to lay siege to the entire United States. Poor things, they finally succumbed to the humble and unassuming bacteria pervading the air on Earth. Imagine, the humble and unassuming bacteria coming to the rescue of mighty mankind!]
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[* 'Martians, Go Home' - a science fiction novel written by Fredric Brown. ]
Evolved souls that we are, jaded spirits that we have become, this time around the first and foremost action we would do would be to rush to create a new page on Wikipedia to record for posterity the historic event! The paparazzi will leave the harassed celebrities alone for a while and strain with their cameras and listening devices to capture images of this wonderful being who is not one of us. Uh, they would be the first to catch the next flight to Mars! The TV, news channels, papers, internet, all the popular shows, will have for a few days nothing but the latest byte about the Martians.
The team in charge of the Mars project will become celebrities in their own right, with their spouses, kids, siblings, distant relatives and pals, even their pet dogs and cats getting full limelight. They will even have the opportunity to appear on Oprah Winfrey and Larry King Shows - the ultimate, I am told, in celebrityhood! And the blogs. Especially the blogs, will have their own take on the Martian, with every blogger worth their salt giving an opinion from all possible angles, three sixty degree and beyond, about what to do with this thing in our midst. We bloggers do not miss any opportunity to speak our mind on anything under the sun, you see.
Philosophers and sociologists and other intellectuals amongst us would present papers on the best way of establishing contact with this representative from a new and unknown society with unknown culture and unknown style of living. A new branch in anthropology will come into being overnight; and people will churn out tomes after best-seller tomes of absorbing content with Martian society as the theme. A new breed of "experts" would come out of nowhere, their beaming faces, arms folded across the chest, a halo please around the head, the mystical aura of a know-all Guru no less, looking at us from spanking new websites, giving us profound insights on what this all means to humanity as a whole.
Suddenly, everybody would be busy! A new opportunity on the horizon, yet another way to make money and become famous! Martian trinkets and memorabilia, Martian music, Martian fashions... Let's cash in on the boom fellas, so much money waits to be made! Oh, what will I not do to be the first to shake hands - or whatever it is that they have in the name of "hands" - with the Martian, and have my photograph splashed all over the media!
Exciting times lie ahead. Let's get busy packing our bags for the next bus to the moon. So when are you coming?
Are you game for traveling to the moon? There is gold waiting for you out there! Here is another interesting take on the subject of celestial trips.
During the physics class, it would amuse me no end when our lecturer would jot down a few equations on the board, and then proceed to tell us pompously how one equation followed from the other, "quite logically". For the life of me, I could never figure out quite how the logical progression happened. My more intelligent peers would nod understandingly, in a way that intelligent people nod when they hear something profound, which made me feel even more sheepish. It was much later when I replaced the word "logic" in his content with "empirical observations", that I began to understand the connection.
Actually once you realize that entire science is based on empirical observations, and that scientists use them to formulate a set of axioms which you decide to believe in, then understanding all their gobbledygook becomes very easy. The trick is to be always aware what these guys construe as axiom and what they construe as hypothesis. The interesting part of the game is, that what was considered an absolute, irrefutable axiom till yesterday (remember that light was supposed to travel in a straight line?), becomes shaky today.
And these physicists are now seeking to create a toy for themselves. This toy is in the form of a pair of pipes being laid in a circle-shaped tunnel about one hundred meters underground between the borders of Switzerland and France. The tunnel has a circumference of 27 kilometers, and a diameter of 3.8 meters. So the toy is, uh, kinda huge. Goes by the fancy name of "Large Hadron Collider" too. Obviously somebody grew up on a diet of science fiction and Asimov. What the wise men and women will do with the pipes is to start a beam of sharply focused light in each of the two pipes. The beams, steady streams of protons bunched together, will be guided to travel in opposite directions such that they collide with each other at four points in the journey.
And pray what will happen as a result of the collision? The theory - or the hope - is that it will result in the creation of a special particle of mass that is heavy by subatomic standards. This particle is technically called the Higgs Boson particle, which a physicist in a particularly eloquent mood christened "the God particle".
They say the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment seeks to recreate the early stage of the Universe's conception, you know, just as the crown was about to come out. The existence of the particle will be proved when the contraption's computers detect its decay. Not when it has been formed, but after having formed, when it begins decaying. How ironic. And what if its existence is proved? The scientists will pat each other on the back that their theory about God has been proved right. This queue please for the Nobel. And if its existence is not proved? Well, they will still pat themselves on the back on the theory continuing to remain to be proved. Tomorrow is going to be yet another day, and so yet another toy.
[The 'November 26, 2007' mentioned in the narrative above was the earlier date of launch of the LHC]
There are a few doomsday predictors who think the whole experiment might unleash something evil and macabre which might even gobble up the earth whole. Now haven't we heard this line before? In another age, another time?
We ordinary mortals really shouldn't mind these scientists and their toys. For it was their little games that gave us all these material comforts. You know, the bulb and the AC and the oven and the car and the TV and the computer and the internet and the cell phone and ... So what's a few billion dollars here and there?
The show is scheduled to begin sometime in June 2008. So take the ringside seat folks, get that popcorn bag and the Coke, and get ready for a face-to-face with this God particle! Hopefully we will live to tell the tale to the grandchildren.
Expect New Discoveries From Stonehenge Excavations
Visualize a structure made of stone in the middle of nowhere. Two large vertical stones, each weighing a few tons, and supporting another, third stone that sits like a lintel on the other two. (Technically known as a trilithon.) The stones being very hard rock, created from sand and glued naturally by silica, and go by the name of "Sarsen" stones.
And now visualize not one, but several such trilithons, all arranged in a circle. And then a similar set of trilithons inside this circle, arranged circularly, but not fully closed. Plus, now visualize another set of blue-colored rock, as nicely hewn as can be using crude tools, again concentric around these two trilithon circles. Yes, you get the picture. Circles within circles. One is talking about the Stonehenge of Great Britain.
Now what exactly was the purpose of such a structure? This week, archaeologists from the Bournemouth University and the Society of Antiquaries have begun yet another attempt to find clues to precisely this question.
Why this fascination with circles? Rationalists speculate that the construction was used to conduct astronomy studies. You see, the study involving accurately measuring the progress of constellations. Now, just consider this. In an age when farming had just begun, benefits of animal husbandry had just about been discovered, clothing came from peeling hides off animal carcasses, writing was unknown and vocabulary was limited, people had moved out of caves and moved into own-constructed houses ... do you think that the one technology and science that would reach such an exalted level would be Astronomy? So much, as to motivate people to make strenuous efforts across quite possibly many years to mount a project of this size? So much for rationalism.
At the same time, it is a wonder how the heavy lintel stones could be lifted to such heights and placed very gingerly over their two supports. The mind also baulks at the gigantic efforts expended in hauling the stones from miles away. And these are the imponderables that lend that extra dimension to the mystique.
As a New Ager, what fascinates me are the engrossing stories about ritualism and spirituality and paganism that have over the centuries grown around the Stonehenge. While one school of thought attributes the structure as the final, resting place of the dead (which the availability of abundant skeletons in the now ongoing excavation will no doubt corroborate), another school of thought attributes to it the center of life and birth, with the centre resembling the human vulva and the birth canal.
There is a lot to learn from the ancients. Even if they were wearing clothing that smelt of carcass and used tools for their masonry that were um, less than sophisticated.
The Comet Brought Her From Oblivion, To Snuff Out Her Life?
It was less than two months ago when I wondered about the arrival of Comet Holmes, and how some people were predicting that this comet represented the resurgence of feminine leadership, and perhaps heralded the coming to power of quite a few women leaders around the world. (Here is the link to that post.) Amongst the names of leaders, I had listed the name of Benazir Bhutto, who came back from a self-imposed exile into the thick of elections of a country known for its ruthless execution of all its ex-leaders - as it turns out, without any mercy towards the feminine gender.
And now look what has happened.
The more one tries to arrive at a pattern in the mysterious workings of the universe... the more the universe turns out exceptions.
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